From the book PROFILES IN
CORRUPTION: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite by
Peter Schweizer. Copyright C 2020 by Peter Schweizer. Reprinted by permission
of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Political figures have long used
their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. In my
new book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s
Progressive Elite,” one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges
as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members
benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for
commercial gain. In Biden’s case, these deals include foreign partners and, in
some cases, even U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The Biden family’s
apparent self-enrichment involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son
Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
When this subject came up
in 2019, Biden declared, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone
else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
As we will see, this is
far from the case…
Joe Biden’s younger brother,
James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the
earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign,
and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the U.S. Senate, he would
bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like
Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice
president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations
to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope
Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his
overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during
his brother’s tenure as vice president.
Consider the case of HillStone International, a subsidiary of the
huge construction management firm, Hill International. The president of
HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in Delaware and was a
longtime Biden family friend. On November 4, 2010, according to White House
visitors’ logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser
Michele Smith in the Office of the Vice President.
James Biden was joining
HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract
in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build
100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by
TRAC Development, a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million
U.S. federal government contract to manage a construction project for the State
Department.
David Richter, son of the
parent company’s founder, was not shy in explainingHillStone’s success in
securing government contracts. It really helps, he told investors at a private
meeting, to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” according to
someone who was there.
The Iraq project was
massive, perhaps the single most lucrative project for the firm ever. In 2012, Charlie
Gasparino of Fox Business reported that HillStone officials
expected the project to “generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three
years.” That amounted to more than three times the revenue the company produced
in 2011.
A group of minority
partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. “There’s
plenty of money for everyone if this project goes through,” said one company
official.
The deal was all set, but
HillStone made a crucial error. In 2013, the firm was forced to back out of the
contract because of a series of problems, including a lack of experience by
Hill and TRAC Development, its South Korean associate firm. But HillStone
continued doing significant contract work in the embattled country, including a
six-year contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
James Biden remained with
Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for
dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico,
Mozambique, and elsewhere.
With the election of his father
as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to
his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of
governments and oligarchs around the world. Sometimes he would hitch a
prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he
was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly.
Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something
from his father.
There was, for example,
Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group, where his
business partner Devon Archer — who’d been at Yale with Hunter — sat on the
board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals
abroad, involving connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses
in China.
But one of the most troubling
Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which Burnham became the
center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against
one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested
in New York in May 2016 and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors
and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.” Other
victims of the fraud included several public and union pension plans. Although
Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints were all over
Burnham. The “legitimacy” that his name and political status as the vice
president’s son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial.
The scheme was explicitly
designed to target pension funds that had “socially responsible investing”
clauses, including pension funds of labor union organizations that had publicly
supported Joe Biden’s political campaigns in the past. Indeed, eight of the
eleven pension funds that lost their money were either government employee or
labor union pension funds. Joe Biden has “a long-standing alliance with labor.”
He closely identifies with organized labor. “I make no apologies,” he has said.
“I am a union man, period.” And many public unions have endorsed him over the
years.
Transcripts from Devon
Archer’s trial offer a clearer picture of Hunter Biden’s role at Burnham Asset
Management, in particular, the fact that the firm relied on his father’s name
and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the
scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns.
Tim Anderson, a lawyer who
did legal work on the issuance of the tribal bonds, recounts seeing Hunter
while visiting the Burnham office in New York City to meet with Bevan Cooney,
who was later convicted in the case.
The political ties that
Biden and Archer had were considered key to the Burnham brand. As stated in an
August 2014 email, Jason Galanis, who was convicted in the bond scheme, agreed
with an unidentified associate who also thought the company had “value beyond
capital” because of their political connections.
In the closing arguments
at the trial, one of Devon Archer’s defense attorneys, Matthew Schwartz,
explained to the jury that it was impossible to talk about the bond scheme
without mentioning Hunter Biden’s name. This “was perfectly sensible,”
according to Schwartz, “because Hunter Biden was part of the Burnham team.”
It would be a dream for any new
company to announce their launch in the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.
StartUp Health is an investment
consultancy based out of New York City, and in June 2011 the company barely had
a website. The firm was the brainchild of three siblings from Philadelphia.
Steven Krein is CEO and co-founder, while his brother, Dr. Howard Krein, serves
as chief medical officer. Sister Bari serves as the firm’s chief strategy officer.
A friend named Unity Stoakes is a co-founder and serves as president.
StartUp Health was barely
up and running when, in June 2011, two of the company’s executives were ushered
into the Oval Office of the White House. They met with President Barack Obama
and Vice President Joe Biden.
The following day the new
company would be featured at a large health care tech conference being run by
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and StartUp Health
executives became regular visitors to the White House, attending events in
2011, 2014 and 2015.
How did StartUp Health
gain access to the highest levels of power in Washington? There was nothing
particularly unique about the company, but for this:
The chief medical officer
of StartUp Health, Howard Krein, is married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.
“I happened to be talking
to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were down there
[in Washington, D.C.],” recalled Howard Krein. “He knew about StartUp Health
and was a big fan of it. He asked for Steve’s number and said, ‘I have to get
them up here to talk with Barack.’ The Secret Service came and got Steve and
Unity and brought them to the Oval Office.”
StartUp Health offers to
provide new companies technical and relationship advice in exchange for a stake
in the business. Demonstrating and highlighting the fact that you can score a
meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a
strategic company asset: high-level contacts.
Vice President Joe Biden
continued to help Krein promote his company at several appearances through his
last months in the White House, including one in January 2017, where he made a
surprise showing at the StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco. The corporate
event, open only to StartUp Health members, enabled the 250 people in attendance
to chat in a closed session with the vice president.
In late March 2009, Vice
President Joe Biden landed in Costa Rica aboard Air Force Two, and went to the
Costa Rican presidential palace for a one-on-one with President Oscar Arias.
The Biden visit had symbolic significance. The last time a high-ranking American
official had visited the country was back in 1997, when Bill Clinton had come.
Joe Biden’s trip to Costa
Rica came at a fortuitous time for his brother Frank, who was busy working
deals in the country. Just months after Vice President Biden’s visit, in
August, Costa Rica News announced a new multilateral partnership “to reform
Real Estate in Latin America” between Frank Biden, a developer named Craig
Williamson, and the Guanacaste Country Club, a newly planned resort. The
partnership, which appears to be ongoing, was wrapped in a beautiful package as
a “call on resources available to the companies and individuals to reform the
social, economic and environmental practices of real estate developers across
the world by example.”
In real terms, Frank’s dream
was to build in the jungles of Costa Rica thousands of homes, a world-class
golf course, casinos, and an anti-aging center. The Costa Rican government was
eager to cooperate with the vice president’s brother.
As it happened, Joe Biden
had been asked by President Obama to act as the Administration’s point man in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Frank’s vision for a
country club in Costa Rica received support from the highest levels of the
Costa Rican government— despite his lack of experience in building such
developments. He met with the Costa Rican ministers of education and energy and
environment, as well as the president of the country.
On October 4, 2016, the
Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education signed a letter of intent with Frank’s
company, Sun Fund Americas. The project involved allowing a company called
GoSolar to operate solar power facilities in Costa Rica. The previous year, the
Obama-Biden administration’s OPIC had authorized a $6.5 million taxpayer-backed
loan for the project.
In June 2014, Vice
President Joe Biden announced the launch of the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative (CESI).
The program called for increasing access to financing for Caribbean energy
projects that he strongly supported. American taxpayer dollars were dedicated
to facilitating deals that matched U.S. government financing with local energy
projects in Caribbean countries, including Jamaica. In January 2015, USAID
announced that it would be spending $10 million to boost renewable energy
projects in Jamaica over the next five years.
After Joe Biden brought
together leaders for CESI, brother Frank’s firm Sun Fund Americas announced
that it was “engaged in projects and is in negotiations with governments of
other countries in the [Caribbean] region for both its Solar and Waste to
Energy development services.” As if to push the idea along, the Obama
administration’s OPIC provided a $47.5 million loan to support the construction
of a 20-megawatt solar facility in Clarendon, Jamaica.
Frank Biden’s Sun Fund
Americas later announced that it had signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) to
build a 20-megawatt solar facility in Jamaica.
During his years in the Senate,
Biden’s family benefited financially in other ways as he leveraged political
power. Joe’s sister Valerie ran all of his Senate campaigns, as well as his
presidential runs in 1988 and 2008.
But she was also a senior
partner in a political messaging firm named Joe Slade White & Company; the only two
executives listed at the firm were Joe Slade White and Valerie.
The firm received large
fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie was running. Two and a half million
dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from Citizens for Biden and Biden
For President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone.
Joe Slade White &
Company worked for Biden campaigns over eighteen years.
No comments:
Post a Comment